Rape in the Morning Appeal, 1880 & 1900

This exhibit will examine the occurrence of rape in the Morning Appeal of Carson City, Nevada. 

It first began publication as the Carson Daily Appeal on May 16, 1865.  In 1880, six hundred copies of the Morning Appeal were circulated.  In 1900, five hundred were in circulation.  Each paper comes in four pages with five columns on each page.  To compare the years and understand the paper, I took issues from the weeks of May 30, 1880 and May 27, 1900.

In both 1880 and 1900, there seemed to be a heavy reliance of ads on the first page.  The ads seemed to stay the same for a week. In 1880, ads dominated the final page, while in 1900, a small story would be on the fourth page.  Pages two and three contained most of the news coverage.  This area is where the crime is largely reported; 90% of rape coverage in the Morning Appeal appears among the second and third pages.  The stories came from local to international coverage. Local stories tend to be more detailed as they have information about people within the area and as stories get farther from Carson City, they tend to become shorter and are sourced from other newspapers.  Unless the stories are quite bizarre or political, they tend to be very brief and generally state the most important details, such as who was involved and why it was of note.

The length of stories on rape ranged from 510 to 15 words with an average of 106 words and a median of 56.  The longest story was a supreme court case about a man who was sentenced for rape but charged with murder and the shortest was about a man being denied pardon on the basis of rape.